The Dreaded Final Push

There are now no less than five pages between me and freedom (Whoopeeee!!!).

I'm back with old Foucault, this time joined by his friend Habermas, and we're putting our heads together to come up with something about social rationalization. I'm still trying to figure out what social rationalization is, let alone what I think about it. Needless to say, I'll be burning the midnight oil.

Meanwhile, my computer emergency dialogue box just popped up to let me know that my hard drive, which I labeled "Lulu's Brain," is dangerously full and that I should back up my information. This issue could prove disastrous and yet I can't help but smile at the coincidence. Hopefully my brain has enough room for one more paper...


I'm not sure which one is Foucault in this illustration, but supposedly he is tucked in among these gentlemen.

Entering the Next Phase

It’s Thanksgiving and I’m sitting on an oversized white couch in my parents’ house, trying in vain to battle the tryptophan overload and get through the final 100 pages of Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punishment. The day’s dinner guests have already headed home with their tinfoil-wrapped leftovers. My dad is playing loud music in his office with the dog. My mom and sister are in the living room watching the (terrible) movie version of the Sex & the City series. I know I should be doing something similar, but the pulse of my usual obligations is hard to ignore and so I’m here, alone with my studies, as I have often been throughout the better portion of my life.

I told myself – that is, literally noted it on my desk calendar earlier in the semester– that I would not be doing any schoolwork on this particular day. As it turns out, that was easier said than done. As many fellow students will attest, not doing homework during Thanksgiving break is nearly impossible when it falls so close to finals time. Regardless, family and friends have often teased me about the fact that I have a hard time going on vacation. “Don’t work too hard,” my Dad always says, slightly ironically.

For as far back as my memory serves, working hard at school has been my job, my religion and, done well, my joy. I might be criticized as a perfectionist occasionally, but it has been mostly curiosity that drives me to take my studies so seriously. I have consumed the gospels of one teacher after another, culling pieces here and there to add to my own changing doctrine of beliefs. I have pursued new topics, studied countless hours, failed tests, written “A” papers, laughed at the folly of some education and felt frustration in my own occasional stupidity. I have truly fought the good fight where education is concerned.

In theory, this is about to change because my graduation is less than a month away now. I’ve weathered the usual questions about my future for longer than most college seniors because I’ve been a college senior for longer than most college seniors. Having graduated from culinary school before attending USF and then taking an additional semester beyond the traditional four years to wrap things up, I am now about one-and-a-half years older than the usual undergraduate senior (23, if you must know). Occasionally, this fact makes me a bit self-conscious, but I certainly don’t regret the path I’ve chosen. Sometimes I think I would stay longer, but lately I’ve become pretty excited to see what will happen to me once I’m no longer officially a student.

Part of me quietly hopes that my matriculation will reveal some kind of epiphany – a divine revelation – to cap off my long academic struggle. But, exactly what greatness will follow? The hopeful fool in me wants to believe that all the secrets of the universe will be revealed to me the moment I throw my mortarboard up into the air, but the realist in me knows that this is likely far from the truth. Any conversation about the current economy is not likely to raise the recent graduate’s spirits. The reality is that my graduation will probably only raise more questions for me – mostly the same questions I’ve already been asked. What happens next? What will I do with myself? How, now, will I occupy my mind? How will I maintain what’s already there? How will I replace this thing that has provided about 80% of my social life and formed the constant rhythm, the backbone of my schedule?

I cannot yet fear the intellectual, emotional and social absence that awaits me once I step outside the walls of the academic world that has cradled me for so long. It’s still too early to imagine what it will feel like to be free of homework and compulsory essays; I am still working on my final papers and will be right up until I graduate. The weighty questions are therefore still temporarily easy to ignore. Obviously I will “do” something because that’s what humans (especially Americans) are good at. We can be very efficient. But what will I think about? What if not Rousseau and digital literacy and Mandarin Chinese? Thinking about the possibilities, I straddle the line between anxiety and excitement.

Perhaps it will be good to let my mind wander, or rest, as it were. It’s good to let the fields lie fallow every now and then. Hopefully the next crop of ideas will be stronger for it.

Projects Up and Coming

Happy Belated 4th!

I am currently hosting two guests, Russell Bentley and the lovely Sky Madden. 

We went downtown to watch the fireworks right next to the S.S. Midway and got stuck in traffic for the next couple of hours following the demonstration. Still not sure if it was worth it.

Here are the things on my plate at the moment:

I am currently helping the Rancho Santa Fe Historical Society put together a cookbook featuring historical recipes, contemporary submissions from current residents and famous recipes from local businesses. I'm hoping to get Chino's Farm, The Inn, Delicious, Thyme in the Ranch, and Milles Fleures on board as well. I'm also helping the society renovate their website and begin a blog to update their members. We'll see how that goes.

When I'm not spending time with Russell and Sky (and Miss Lucille), I'm working on my summer Arts Reporting directed study. I've read some submissions from MFK Fisher and Alex Kapranos' collection of food memoires from his tour with Franz Ferdinand called Sound Bites. Next I will read "Vibration Cooking or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl" by Vertamae Grosvenor in order to write an essay comparing the three as well as my own food memoire. Where to begin? I have so many great memories that involve food.

I'm also working on an essay about the importance of lyrics. Namely, do they matter in music? If so, under what circumstances do they matter? The Professor of Pop (who is currently away from the internet for a month or so to write about Zep) is overseeing this one. Feel free to give me your thoughts on lyrics. I've gotten a mixed bag of answers so far.

More to come. 

Let Us Discuss Lettuce

This summer I am taking a directed study course on arts reporting with assignments from Professor Teresa Moore and the Professor of Pop, Andrew Goodwin.

One of my first assignments was a food comparison exercise. I was to select and compare nine different types of salad greens, focusing on aspects like softness/crunchiness and sweetness/bitterness, among others. Here is what I found:

Heirloom Freckles Romaine Lettuce (from my own garden)
Freckles romaine lettuce -- an heirloom variety -- is oval, narrowing at the base of the stem. The leaves are smooth, slightly waxy and very thin, tearing easily. Their color is striking – pale green with blood-red freckles and a light pink stem. They taste grassy and nutty with a sweet finish.

Frissée

Frissée has thin pale-yellow branch-like stems off a thicker main stem. The jagged, narrow chartreuse green leaves on these branches curl around each other, adding to the tangle of aggressively bitter greens. The leaves are soft, but the stem is crunchy and rigid – this unusual structure makes it somewhat difficult to eat.

Iceberg

Iceberg lettuce has waxy, concave round leaves with a ragged edge. These leaves hug closely to one another, the foremost leaves conforming to the layers beneath it. Iceberg is pale green at the base and lime green around the edges of the leaves. The top of each leaf is soft and floppy and partially crunchy like Styrofoam towards the base. It is watery and sweet with a grassy finish.

Spinach

Spinach’s fibrous, dimpled leaves are lobed, almost spade-shaped at times and grow a single leaf to each stem. They are medium green, dull and soft with fine veins. The stems are long, thin and crunchy. Spinach is nutty and slightly salty with a metallic finish. The stem has a greater concentration of this flavor. The smaller leaves seem to be bitterer.

Romaine Lettuce

Romaine is large, compared to other salad greens, with a round tip that becomes jagged on the edges near the base. It is leathery and slightly ruffled with many veins and a big stalk-like pale green stem. The leaves are a medium green with a mild flavor and only a hint of bitterness in the stalk. The leaves are soft relative to the crunchy stem.

Radicchio

Radicchio is soft and flexible at the edge of the leaf with a stiff, crunchy stem. It has a waxy texture, similar to iceberg lettuce – rounded into a concave “bowl” with many ripples and folds. Radicchio is predominantly a saturated magenta with contrasting white veins and stem. Its taste is equally sweet and bitter.

Arugula (from my garden)

Arugula has a thin, crunchy stem and soft, flat lobed leaves that increase in size up the stem and end with a round lobe at the top. These leaves are grass green with thin magenta veins and rimmed with the same bright pink color along the edge. Arugula is not overly toothsome, but it is fibrous like spinach. The taste of arugula is nutty and salty initially, followed immediately by intense bitterness and a peppery punch that moves in quickly and recedes slowly from the tongue. The flowers are also edible with a similar taste.

Red Mustard Greens

Mustard Greens are thin and feathery, like a quill, with a pointy leaf and edges that poke out like flattened green fused thorns. The leaves are flat towards the tip and slightly curly where jagged along the edge. The stem is crunchy with tiny prickly hairs that disappear towards the base of the leaf. Most leaves are a medium green with a yellow tone; however, some have a deep pink stem, much like radicchio, while some stems are predominantly yellow with a hint of pink. The flavor of mustard greens is intensely bitter (the magenta-stemmed ones appear to be more bitter than their yellow-stemmed counterparts), then nutty with an acrid finish.

Belgian endive

Belgian Endive’s leaves are very pale – almost white – yellow with light fuzz (like one finds on a peach). This fuzz is denser on the top of each leaf. The edge of the leaf is soft and tears easily. The stem is thick and crunchy and blends into the thin leafy portion. The leaves fit tightly together like shingles to form a dense core and when pulled apart resemble hollowed out rabbits’ feet. Belgian endive is slightly bitter, although less so than frissée.

These are just a few of the many varieties of lettuce out there. Next on my agenda is to make three recipes using some of these greens. Stay tuned for that.

Move!

This weekend Presentation Theater will host "Move", a dance concert featuring new choreographic work from members of USF's dance department (Cecelia Bowman, Naby Bangoura, Katie Faulkner, Sharonjean Leeds, Eli Nelson, and Alison de Oliveira). As if seeing work from some of SF's finest choreographers isn't compelling enough reason to come, you will also get to see me perform dressed like a secretary at a morgue!

This is some seriously good stuff and should not be missed. Tickets are $5 at the door. Get more info here.

National Library Week Wrap-Up

Here is the audio slideshow that Lis Bartlett and I made for National Library Week:



Also, check out the Davies Forum National Library Week display in Gleeson Library.

Behind the Scenes with Kevin Epps

Play Movie
Originally uploaded by luluisforlovers

Media maker Kevin Epps comes from a community that "doesn't really have a voice," he said during a lecture for the Davies Forum this week. The socially active San Franciscan helped give it one when he made his 2005 movie, "Straight Outta Hunter's Point".

Since then, Epps has continued his work in the area activism in urban communities using a variety of media ranging from digital film to podcasting. "I like new media because it gives me a voice, too," he said. "Things pop up on YouTube and shift the conversation."

One of his primary concerns is bridging the digital divide for members of his community, but not having access to the latest technology and education make this difficult. "Everything is based on speed," Epps said. "There's not many brothers who can hang out with Google, so it's up to me to connect the dots," he laughed.

Epps is currently working on a number of projects, he says. One of these is film about inmates at Alcatraz that he hopes to show there next February as part of Black History Month. Another project will involve its subjects in a "hood exchange": kids from Brooklyn and Hunter's Point will trade places to experience life from another perspective.

What I dislike about Gleeson Library at USF

What I dislike about Gleeson: 

Swiping to get into the library. Sometimes I have my hands full of books or other study items when I approach the library and trying to open the doors is enough of a challenge - fishing around for an ID doesn't make this situation any easier.

I realize that the card swipes might help secure the building, but requiring cards for access is also discouraging to those who want to use the library. I was waiting at the circulation desk, near the entrance, attempting to pay some late fees (another thing I dislike about the library, though admittedly my fault!) earlier today. While I was standing there, a number of individuals who were not part of the USF community but were on campus for a conference approached the gates to be let in. 

A woman came in through the doors and waited for a little while at the gates, confused, before retreating back out the doors. Later, a man approached the desk, looked imploringly into the circulation desk area, as one must do if she forgets her card, before being interrogated by a deskworker for entrance into the library. The deskworker asked him if he was a teacher, which he was not, and then asked what he was here for, to which he responded "just visiting", so she let him in. I'm not sure, but I doubt that someone asking for admittance into the library would admit that they were there to "steal some books" or "graffiti the third floor bathroom". 

That's not to say that I don't think monitoring the library is worthwhile. Certainly, we have a lot of awesome books to protect! I think that the video monitors set up throughout the building are probably good prevention against nefarious activity (like graffiti or promiscuity in the stacks) and the metal detectors (book detectors?) at the exit are a perfectly reasonable defense as well.

One thing I do like about the gates is their sound, strangely enough. I used to try and block it out when I was reading on the 2nd floor balcony, but now I embrace the sound like many San Franciscans embrace the bellowing foghorns late at night. The unique gentle swooshing of the gates is somewhat comforting against the trickling waterfall nearby. It reminds me, while I work, that I'm in a special place surrounded by books and knowledgeable people and, for the most part, peace and quiet. The loudest my library experience gets is when someone forgets their card, setting off the gate alarm, and must then carry out a loud cross-room conversation with the circulation attendant as to who they are and why they don't have a card. 

I wonder, could we keep the swishing sound and lose the card swipe?

What I like About Gleeson Library at USF

What I like about Gleeson:

Doing some copying
Originally uploaded by luluisforlovers

Woman in the Moon
Originally uploaded by luluisforlovers

My Blog, My Self: Understanding Online Identity

So you are a budding musician with two cats, a Vespa, a college degree in computer science and thing for extreme frisbee on the weekends in the park -- that's not what your MySpace says.

According to MySpace, you are the recently-single drummer for a band called The Death Tulip who likes to "rrrrrOCK!", collects psychedelic 60's concert posters, rides a "hog," and maintains an athletic build through rigorous weekend activity ("about which one need not elaborate"). On Facebook, one learns that you are the founder of the Phoebe Cates's Bikini fan club, are "friends" with over 400 people from your school, are an Atheist, and have recently graduated to the Pioneer level of Oregon Trail status. One might also speculate by your decision to include both men and women under preferences that you are bisexual (although this was not really your intention). On your online company profile for the software-related magazine to which you contribute, they have you listed as a "quiet guy whose true personality comes through in the many ARG's he plays." Oh, and you just tweeted that you "think Hilary(sic) is a racist."

So, who are you really?

Well, you are someone I just made up, if we are to be fair. But the figurative you reflects the increasingly common issue of cultivating one's online identity -- and maintaining it.

Upside of creating multiple online profiles: One can, as blogger sweetheart Dana Boyd says, "write oneself into being." In other words: go wild! Be who you want to be! You can be the quiet journalist AND the hog-riding athletic drummer of a supposedly kick-ass band! 

Downside of creating multiple online profiles: There is a reason that people take medication for schizophrenia. One finds plenty of challenges managing a single identity (as we do when we enter this world) -- managing two or three or more identities (especially if you throw in the ones created by other people about you) is understandably stressful. What does my intended audience need to know about me? What do I want them to know about me? Who am I to these people? v. Who am I to these people?

Deciding how to represent oneself in different areas of our online life is only half the battle. The other half is about controlling these potentially disparate representations. People like Fred Stutzman and his colleagues at ClaimID are attempting to address this issue.

ClaimId addresses what Stutzman calls the "Google Problem" -- the (at time, unfortunate) results of someone plugging your name into a Google search. You may not be ashamed of your first website or online high school science project, but when they pop up as the number two and three entries in a search for your name, it becomes somewhat problematic if you are trying to impress potential employers (or dates?). Those sites represent the yous of a past era and there is no reason for them to receive the attention they would in such an important slot in your ego roll.

Stutzman refers to claimID as an "activist tool". It allows you to regain control of your online identity by creating identity awareness. " The site allows you to group your blog, website, news articles about you, and any other relevant sites that might otherwise be over looked in a Google search, into one place. "With claimID, you can put your best face forward and let people see the identity you with to present," the claimID site reads.

The final kicker about online identity is that nothing you put out there ever really goes away. The things you say about yourself, the things others say about you -- they are in there somewhere forever, especially now that organizations like the Internet Archive are busy trying to record it all (thankfully). This could be a good thing or a bad thing for you, depending on the context. Is there any way to delete unfavorable entries that keep popping up on Google searches? "Whoever figures that out will be rich," said Stutzman.

With this in mind, I might be inclined to say something like "blog at your own risk", but even the cautious blogger cannot anticipate all of his or her future publics. We might think we are beating the system or using it to our advantage by crafting different profiles -- different selves -- to match various audiences; however, we are merely just creating an interactive, multidimensional image that grows richer in ways we might not anticipate nor appreciate (not always, anyways). We must learn to cultivate this library of our selves.

Firestone: Rubber or Rubbish?





Emira Woods discussed the Stop Firestone Campaign as part of the Global Women's Rights Forum at USF this week, focusing specifically on Firestone's involvement in the issues of "modern slave labor" and child labor. Firestone's workers are, in order to get paid, required to fill a quota, hauling large, heavy quantities of rubber sap over great distances for little pay. Additionally, the wives and children of these men are dragged into the equation because the men need the extra help and have no other way to spend time with their families during long toilsome work days. A more in-depth account of Woods' points on the matter can be found on my friend Lis' blog.

I wonder... would the Michelin Man force his workers to live in shanty houses?

Alexander Technique

"How many times a day do you tweet?" asked Bryan Alexander, Director of Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, a non-profit initiative dedicated to promoting liberal education.
"Six to ten times," the student responded.

No, this isn't bird school.

Guest speaker Alexander was simply talking about www.twitter.com, a site that encourages individuals to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of brief, frequent answers to the question "What are you doing?" These exchanges are known by those who use the site as "tweets."

Bryan Kicks Back
Originally uploaded by luluisforlovers

Alexander is definitely a frequent tweeter. Even as he lectured us on pedagogy and Web 2.0., tweets of various hellos from around the world scrolled on the projected computer screen behind him.

Vermont_snow_2005Oct-b
Originally uploaded by BryanAlexander

The long-haired, bearded technology buff was visiting USF from his home in snowy rural Vermont, where he conducts research primarily on mobile and wireless computing, digital gaming, and social software. "It's fun to lecture on 3D technology and then go off and chop wood for an hour," Alexander said.

One area of particular interest to Alexander is "ARG": Alternate Reality Gaming. An Alternate Reality Game is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions. The first two Alternate Reality Games, according to Christy Dena in her essay 'Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games', were Microsoft Game Studio's The Beast and Electronic Arts Majestic. In his lecture, Alexander also mentioned www.ilovebees.com, Perplex City, and World Without Oil as good examples of Alternate Reality Gaming.

Reflecting his easy-going approach to technology, Alexander followed discussion of "Connectivism" (G. Siemens, 2004) and "Wikipedagogies" by taking us to the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator.
"Web 2.0 is easier than web 1.0," he said.

If that's true, then I should have no problem disintermediating my A-list web services and designing social folksonomies later this week.

Louden Up Now!


I have decided to write about !!!'s album, Louden Up Now, for my 20-30 page Popular Music & Communication paper. Intimidating? Yes, a bit... but I'm up for the challenge.

This album will be a good one to dig into because, as Professor Andrew Goodwin would say, it has a lot of "purchase." Musically, the album combines punk, disco/funk with the rave mentality of the late 80s and 90s. It speaks equally about drugs and politics (not in George's favor, go figure). It encourages you to dance, it encourages you to scream. It will be interesting to see what else I get out of it.

Here is the music video for the single "Hello? Is this thing on?" off of Louden Up Now:


Oh yeah, and the band's name, !!!, can be pronounced by repeating anything three times. Chk Chk Chk is the most popular, but bam bam bam or uh uh uh would work, too.

Ciao Ciao Ciao

Brewster Kahle takes us way back with the Internet Archive

One Lap Top Per Brewster
Originally uploaded by luluisforlovers

Brewster Kahle, the founder and digital librarian at the non-profit Internet Archive, stopped by USF to speak with the Davies students and friends last Thursday. Kahle also helps direct the Open Content Alliance, a collaborative effort among a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content.

Kahle noted that, with Web 2.0, there is a desire to share information that we need to explore now because "we could lost it really quite quickly," he said.

"Knowledge available to everyone is a possibility," said Kahle, " but the political will to live in an open environment is missing from society." Kahle believes in "Universal Access to all knowledge" -- free information to all. "Free as in beer, free as in speech," he said. Kahle works towards this end by focusing on archiving texts, audio, moving images, and software on the web. "We live in an unexamined world," he said.

One of his primary projects is digitizing texts so they can be accessed and easily reprinted. So far he has up to 300,000 books in eight collections. Many of these digitized books are printed out for only $1 a book by the Book Mobile, a library on wheels. He is setting his sights on digitizing the Library of Congress, which houses 26,000,000 unique texts.

The Internet Archive is also home to recordings of 40,000 concerts and 2,500 bands that range from The Grateful Dead to chamber music and 55,000 moving images in 100 collections. These videos tend to be "those films that they showed you in junior high when you had a substitute teacher," Kahle said. This would include things like drive-in movie ads and tobacco industry videos. "It's an influential medium that almost always goes unexamined," he said. Additionally, the site has been recording television 24 hours a day for the last eight years.




One of the most interesting and popular projects the Internet Archive has done is the "Wayback Machine," which takes a snapshot of every page on the internet (with some exceptions) every two months. It has been operating since 1996 and "it's getting pretty big, " said Kahle. It now houses 2 PB of stuff.

Should the Internet be public or private? Open or proprietary?

"How we communicate across generations is in our artifacts. We are in our most interesting phase in the battle over the internet. It's got to be public or we will perish," Kahle said. "Universal access can be one of the greatest achievements; our generation's gift. All you need is curiosity."

Chew on this!

Ivan Chew, the self-titled "liblogarian", came to visit USF last Thursday. He has been blogging since 2004 and now runs no less than nine blogs, which focus on topics ranging from book reviews to documenting the changing face of his hometown Singapore to creating mash-up music videos with an oceanic theme.


"It's not the blogs that matter, it's the blogger that matters," Chew said, reminding us to blog with passion and authority about what we like as well as what we know.

Meet my Davies Class.